In surfing, the impact zone is the spot where the wave crashes down over your head. It's a tough place to be, but it's where the power of the ocean is at its most intense. Tech has its own impact zone, the place where emerging technologies meet the market and either disrupt industries or sink without a trace. I covered many of these developments during my decade on the staff of Wired Magazine, and I witnessed their business impact as custom content director at PCWorld|Macworld. Prior to that, I delved into various technologies at a string of specialist publications. I'll report here as the gathering waves in biotech, robotics, energy, entertainment, consumer electronics, and information technology crash against the shores of business and reshape the global landscape.

This secretive research arm of the Defense Department has a unique mission: to embrace the most wide-eyed visions of the future and manifest them in the here and now. Founded in 1958 as a shocked and fearful response to Russia‘s launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Darpa has over 45 years racked up a consistent record of innovation that has utterly transformed contemporary life: the Internet, cloud computing, GPS, speech recognition, satellite imagery. Of course, that’s to say nothing of the department’s many military technologies, such as aircraft nearly invisible to radar, unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles, and interplanetary rocket engines.

Few private companies have a record like this, Google notwithstanding. Can people working in the private sector adopt some of Darpa’s prowess at breaking fertile new ground? Is there a formula to the agency’s success?

In a provocative address at the FutureMed conference last week in Mountain View, California, Jay Schnitzer, former director of the Darpa’s Defense Sciences Office, offered some clues. Having recently left the government, Schnitzler can speak relatively freely about how his team routinely transformed the impossible into the inevitable.

Schnitzer began with a set of questions developed by George Heilmeier, the legendary director of Arpa (Darpa’s predecessor) during the 1970s. These questions, still used by Darpa to this day, lay the groundwork for any innovative project by making sure its outlines are clearly drawn, thus heading off the tendency to be dazzled by a brilliant concept. Here, then, is what is known as the Heilmeier Catechism:

• What problem are you solving, in plain English? How do you propose to solve it?

• How is the problem managed today, and what are the limits of that approach?

• What’s different about your solution, and what gives you hope that it will succeed?

• If your solution is successful, what impact will it have? How will it be that impact be measured?

• How will the program be organized?

• What intermediate results will it generate to help determine whether it’s on track?

• How will you measure its progress?

• What will it cost?

In describing how Darpa applies the Heilmeier Catechism, Schnitzer focused first not on organizational structure or process but on people. Darpa couldn’t accomplish what it does without a cadre of program managers, he said, drawn from diverse fields including mathematics, physical sciences, biology, and neuroscience. Schnitzer described the qualities the agency looks for in making a hire. Darpa program managers

• Embody best-in-class technical excellence

• Possess extraordinary confidence, but short of arrogance

• Are capable of assessing a project as a whole while also tracking its component tasks (a quality he called “dynamic range”)

• Act with a sense of urgency. People don’t stay at the agency for long, and they’re eager to make their mark while they’re there

• Have a strong desire to change the world and come to work every day ready to make a difference.

Of course, those program managers must have meaningful projects to work on, and much of the agency’s success as an innovator comes down to choosing its targets. In this regard, the key word is audacity. “If it’s a sure bet, we’re not interested,” Schnitzer said. Beyond that, projects that merit Darpa’s attention tend to be

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